It was a dark and stormy night

"Dark and stormy night" redirects here. For the film, see Dark and Stormy Night (film).

"It was a dark and stormy night" is an infamous phrase written by Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton at the beginning of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford.^[1] The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest uses the phrase as a signifier of purple prose. The original opening sentence of Paul Clifford is an example:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest was formed to "celebrate" the worst extremes in this style. The contest, sponsored by the English Department of San Jose State University, recognizes the worst examples of "dark and stormy night" writing.

Literary and media references

• There is at least one literary usage of this phrase predating Bulwer-Lytton, possibly suggesting its use as a standard convention in English by the early 19th century. Washington Irving, in his 1809 satire The History of New York, uses it to set the scene in which Peter Stuyvesant's loyal trumpeter Antony Van Corlear meets his untimely end.
• In the Peanuts comic strip by Charles M. Schulz, the character Snoopy was often shown to be starting yet another of many novels with the canonical phrase, or variations of it. The strip first used the phrase on 12 July 1965.^[2]
• In humorous tribute to Snoopy's 1969 version of his novel that used the phrase as its title, Issue #500 of Detective Comics, from 1981, included a two-page Batman story, "Once Upon a Time...", featuring no spoken dialogue, only narrative captions that were a verbatim transcript of Snoopy's novel as presented in three daily Peanuts strips that were reprinted in the 1970 compilation book Peanuts Classics.
• Chris Claremont has written at least two stories with that title:^[3] Uncanny X-Men #195 (July 1985), and Sovereign Seven #1 (July 1995).
• In the 1941 Dodd, Mead edition (reprinted in 1997 as the Wordsworth Classic edition) and in Richard Pevear's 2006 translation of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, chapter 65 begins with this phrase. In the original French, the opening line of the chapter is C'etait une nuit orageuse et sombre.^[4]
• The first line of Wilhelm Raabe's story Die schwarze Galeere (1860/61) begins with the phrase. In the original German it reads "Es war eine dunkle, stürmische Nacht"
• Madeleine L'Engle's novel A Wrinkle in Time begins with this line, and it is indeed the novel's entire first paragraph.
• Ray Bradbury's novel Let's All Kill Constance starts with this line.
• Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman in their novel Good Omens allude to the phrase in altered satirical form, thusly: "It wasn't a dark and stormy night. It should have been, but there's the weather for you. For every mad scientist who's had a convenient thunderstorm just on the night his Great Work is complete and lying on the slab, there have been dozens who've sat around aimlessly under the peaceful stars while Igor clocks up the overtime."
• In Philip Pullman's novel Spring-Heeled Jack, each chapter starts with a play on a famous opening line. "It was a dark and stormy night" is the only one to be used twice: for the first chapter, and for the final chapter.
• Arm in Arm by Remy Charlip includes a continuous self-referential spiral of text based on the phrase
• It is the opening line to Joni Mitchell's song "The Crazy Cries of Love".
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Royale", a fictional novel begins with this line, prompting Jean-Luc Picard to comment, "Not a promising beginning."
• In Resident Evil 0 and Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles the video secuence in both first chapters start with the main antagonist Albert Wesker narrating the events, starting with "It was a dark and stormy night..."

See also

• Once upon a time
• Purple prose
• The pen is mightier than the sword, another Bulwer-Lytton line

References

1. ^ Lytton, Edward Bulwer (1800s). Paul Clifford. New York: Cassell Pub. Co. OCLC 19091989. 
2. ^ Schulz, Charles M., The Complete Peanuts 1965-1966, Fantagraphics Books, 2007
3. ^ http://www.comics.org/story/name/It%20Was%20A%20Dark%20and%20Stormy%20Night/sort/alpha/
4. ^ Dumas, Alexandre (2004). "Chapter LXV: Le Jugement". Les trois mousquetaires. Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13951/13951-8.txt.